Trump warns of World War III

> He says Clin­ton’s Syria plan would trig­ger con­flict with Rus­sia

WASH­ING­TON: US Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee Don­ald Trump said yes­ter­day Demo­crat Hil­lary Clin­ton’s plan for Syria would “lead to World War III”, be­cause of the po­ten­tial for con­flict with mil­i­tary forces from nu­clear-armed Rus­sia.

In an in­ter­view fo­cused largely on for­eign pol­icy, Trump said de­feat­ing Is­lamic State (IS) is a higher pri­or­ity than per­suad­ing Syr­ian Pres­i­dent Bashar alAs­sad to step down, play­ing down a longheld goal of US pol­icy.

Trump ques­tioned how Clin­ton would ne­go­ti­ate with Rus­sian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin af­ter de­mon­is­ing him; blamed Pres­i­dent Barack Obama for a down­turn in US re­la­tions with the Philip­pines un­der its new leader, Ro­drigo Duterte; be­moaned a lack of Repub­li­can unity be­hind his can­di­dacy, and said he would eas­ily win the elec­tion if the party lead­ers would sup­port him.

“If we had party unity, we couldn’t lose this elec­tion to Hil­lary Clin­ton,” he said.

On Syria’s civil war, Trump said Clin­ton could drag the United States into a world war with a more ag­gres­sive pos­ture to­wards re­solv­ing the con­flict.

Clin­ton has called for the es­tab­lish­ment of a no-fly zone and “safe zones” on the ground to pro­tect non-com­bat­ants.

Some an­a­lysts fear that pro­tect­ing those zones could bring the United States into di­rect con­flict with Rus­sian fighter jets.

“What we should do is fo­cus on IS. We should not be fo­cus­ing on Syria,” said Trump as he dined on fried eggs and sausage at his Trump Na­tional Do­ral golf re­sort.

“You’re go­ing to end up in World War III over Syria if we lis­ten to Hil­lary Clin­ton.

“You’re not fight­ing Syria any more, you’re fight­ing Syria, Rus­sia and Iran, all right? Rus­sia is a nu­clear coun­try, but a coun­try where the nukes work as op­posed to other coun­tries that talk,” he said.

Clin­ton’s cam­paign dis­missed the crit­i­cism, not­ing that both Repub­li­can and Demo­cratic na­tional se­cu­rity ex­perts have de­nounced Trump as un­fit to be com­man­der-in-chief. – Reuters

Trump hugs a US flag as he comes on­stage at a rally in Tampa, Florida.